Performance Optimizations Currently Being Tested

11/18/2014 12:01 PM

We’ve received a lot of feedback on the performance of ACU over the past week and we’re taking it very seriously. Ensuring that you get the best gaming experience is part of the reason we make games in the first place, so hearing that the game isn’t performing as expected for some of you is cause for serious concern. We know this is a very important issue to you and we want to see it resolved as much as you do.

We’ve been investigating this since launch, because this type of issue requires a great deal of attention and care in both finding the root causes and resolving them. It’s taken us some time to make progress on this front, but we’ve got some promising findings to share.

We can tell you that we have detected a distinct discrepancy between what we observed in the pre-launch versus post-launch environment. In spite of our testing, it looks like the instruction queue is becoming overloaded and impacting performance. We have several fixes we are exploring right now and will continue to update you with our progress of what is working and how quickly we can implement these fixes in the game in the weeks ahead.

Meanwhile, we are looking at the following revisions that should improve framerate stability for all players:

Streamlining some technical aspects of navigation: We’ve fixed a number of edge cases with our detection system to smooth certain behaviors during parkour. We’ve fixed a few objects which were improperly tagged to smooth navigation.

Improving task scheduling: We’ve tuned the way the computing tasks are prioritized and parallelized by the processor cores to improve framerate in certain edge cases.

Tweaking performance for Reach High Points: We’ve optimized the reach high points, during the camera swooping sequence to improve framerate a little bit.

Though crowd size was something we looked at extensively pre-launch, it is something we continue to keep a close eye on. We have just finished a new round of tests on crowd size but have found it is not linked to this problem and does not improve frame rate, so we will be leaving crowds as they are.

We’re working very hard to see these changes rolled out in Patch 3, but as we’re still testing our fixes we need to be conservative with any estimates as far as ETA is concerned. We hope to have further updates on this topic before the end of the week.

Please continue to share your thoughts and feedback in the comments below and in the forums, and make sure you’re submitting your problems to our support site!